Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith

Covenant, Promise, and the Gift of Time

If we categorize religions according to whether they give greater prominence to time or to space, the role of “promise” marks a religion of covenant as clearly a religion of time. Yet the future is unknowable and can only be present to us as a field of possibilities. How far do these possibilities extend? The question directs us back to the nature of time, a question that became concealed in th...

Refuting Attacks Against Our Faith: An Example

My focus in this essay is to illustrate, through a detailed analysis of one particular article, the range of fallacious tactics that are used in attacks against religious faith. This article espouses a characterization of faith as a “mind virus,” more technically called a meme. Before analyzing this article, some brief background on memes seems appropriate. The term meme was first introduced by...

dEfininG faitH and faitH PraCtiCES

recent studies demonstrate an overlapping relationship between faith practices of individuals, family functioning, and the corporate faith of congregations. this study reports on the psychometric properties of the Christian faith Practices Scale (CfPS), which was created to empirically measure dykstra’s faith behaviors or “practices.” analysis of a large purposive sample (n=7,403) indicates ini...

Faith, Hope and Doubt

Free groups and roses

Consider the 2n symbols x1, . . . , xn, x−1 1 , . . . , x −1 n . Collect these into a set G. There is a map from G to itself which interchanges xi and x−1 i . This map is denoted by the usual inversion symbol g 7→ g−1. Thus x−1 i is unambiguous and (x −1 i ) −1 = xi. The empty word will be denoted by 1. A word is defined to be a finite ordered list of elements of G, depicted as exemplified by x...